News

6to5 Renamed As Babel - Are You Ready For The Next Gen JavaScript?   Wednesday 18 February

The next version of JavaScript is almost with us, but that doesn't mean it is ready to use. If you want to get started with it, you need Babel. 

HeartForth An Emoji Based Language   Wednesday 18 February

This was thought up for Valentine's day but it isn't too late for next year! It also has some interesting technical side issues that make stack-oriented languages look attractive.

Robotics for Good   Wednesday 18 February

The United Arab Emirates has launched an annual award that asks you to combine robotics and artificial intelligence to improve how governments meet citizens' needs in the areas of education, healthcare and social services.

LinkedIn Restricts Developer Access   Tuesday 17 February

LinkedIn has announced that it is restricting use of most of its APIs to approved partners. This has angered many developers who have created third party extension to LinkedIn but are unlikely to be accepted into its partnership program.

EDSAC Chassis Rediscovered   Tuesday 17 February

An original chassis from EDSAC, one of the world's earliest computers, has come to light in the USA and been donated to the UK National Museum of Computing where reconstruction of the 1940s machine is taking place.

Python 2 Versus Python 3 Revisited   Monday 16 February

Results are available for the second annual Python 2.x versus 3.x usage survey. Python 3 does seem to be gaining ground, but perhaps too slowly for comfort.

PeerJ - Open Access Peer Reviewed Computer Science   Monday 16 February

PeerJ is a new peer reviewed journal for computer science. It will be open access, which means that readers don't have to pay, but authors will need a publishing plan. Is this as good as it gets?

Docker 1.5 Released   Monday 16 February

A new version of Docker has been released with IPv6 support, read-only containers, stats, “named Dockerfiles” and more. 

Flying Ball Drone Wins $1 Million Prize   Sunday 15 February

Flyability's insect-inspired, crash resilient drone, Gimball, is the winner of the inaugural UAE Drones for Good Award, an international contest for the best use of civilian drones

Programming Languages On GitHub   Saturday 14 February

What could be better than having a nice interactive display that shows how languages compare? GitHut uses GitHub data to present the state of the languages - on GitHub of course. 

Introduction to Robotics MOOC   Friday 13 February

A seven-week MOOC that provides an introduction to robotics and the mathematics and algorithms required to control them starts on February 15th,

Microsoft Open Sources TouchDevelop   Friday 13 February

Adding to its orgy of open sourcing, Microsoft has added TouchDevelop to the list. The big problem is that a lot of people who might like TouchDevelop don't even know it exists. What is it all about?

Stable Node.js Release   Friday 13 February

The developers of Node.js have released a stable version of the open source JavaScript project.

Scala.js Exits Experimental Stage   Thursday 12 February

The developers of Scala.js have dropped the experimental flag associated with their Scala to JavaScript compiler, and updated the version to v0.6.0.

Computer History Museum Announces 2015 Fellows   Thursday 12 February

The Computer History Museum recently announced the three recipient of its 2015 Fellow awards. They are Evelyn Berezin, Charles Bachman and Bjarne Stroustrup. 

Most Popular Computer Languages 2015   Thursday 12 February

For the fourth year in a row Python has emerged as the most popular language on a site that sets coding challenges. It has a community of over 40,000 developers and is used by over 2,000 employers to screen job candidates. 

The Core

Android Adventures - Building The UI   Tuesday 17 February

If you've been reading Android Adventures, at this point you understand how the Activity and the View fit together to create a simple application, but the Android UI is more complicated than most because of its need to cope with a range of very different screen sizes and orientations. In this chapter, now updated to Android Studio Version 1.0, we look at the problem of layout and working with the UI framework. On the way we build a calculator app.

Exploring Edison - Setting Up The Breakout Boards   Thursday 12 February

There is no avoiding the fact that if you are going to work with the Edison and get something special out of it then you are going to have to go native.  In this installment of Exploring Edison we get connected to Linux on both the Arduino and mini-breakout boards.